


Remembering Amnesia

by thuvia ptarth (thuviaptarth)



Category: Angel: the Series
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-09-01
Updated: 2004-09-01
Packaged: 2017-10-03 19:24:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,863
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21399
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thuviaptarth/pseuds/thuvia%20ptarth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wesley, post-"Lineage." <i>He doesn't think </i>car, freeway, north <i>any more than a bird fleeing winter thinks of longitude and latitude.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Remembering Amnesia

1.

He knows the three blank messages on his voice mail are Angel because there's no machine static or computer click but he still can't hear anyone breathing. The fourth time, Angel says "Take as much time as you need" before he hangs up. He uses the overly casual voice that means that he cares, that he is afraid Wesley will break, or is already broken.

The fifth call comes a minute later. "Just wanted to say ... we need you. When you're ready. Wes. Come back."

He erases the messages before he leaves.

2.

He's in the queue for check-in at LAX before he realizes that England is the second-to-last place in the world he wants to go. Some vestige of self-preservation propels him out of line, out the rotating glass doors into the parched heat of California day. He doesn't think _car, freeway, north_ any more than a bird fleeing winter thinks of longitude and latitude.

The next thing he's aware of is his hands on the wheel, the endless black strip of freeway unrolling, the blaze of sunlight off ocean. He needs sunglasses. His shoulders and arms burn as if they're bruised: adrenaline shake-down.

He left the last place in the world he wants to be yesterday evening, and at some point he's going to have to _(face her again)_ go back. When he thinks about it, it gets hard to breathe. He stops thinking about it.

3.

_Don't be stupid, boy,_ his father says, but it will work, it really will, Wesley tries to show him. He presses the dead bird's open beak to the shallow cut on his wrist and urges it to drink. Its filmy eye blinks, clears, darkens to black.

_Now look what you've done,_ Angel chides him, and panic crashes wings against his rib cage, trying to break free. _No, no, I can fix it--_ and he plunges the stake deep in his father's heart. His father chokes, gasps. Blood bubbles up on his mouth and Wesley jerks at the stake, trying to reorientate it.

_The heart, Mr. Wyndam-Pryce, not the liver,_ Quentin Travers says wearily. _Difficult as they may be to tell apart._

The watching schoolchildren snicker. _Old bastard doesn't_ have _a heart,_ Wesley mutters, and pins down his father's flailing legs so he can make another go. His grip slips on the bloody stake. He wipes his hands on his jeans out of long habit, mustn't get the books dirty, but when he tries to turn the page he sees he's leaving red fingerprints on the yellowed paper. _Fool boy, can you do nothing right?_ his father says behind him, and bright blood wells up through the letters, glistening on the page, no matter how he tries to press it back down.

4.

The construction crews subcontracted to the state of California for the cleanup of what used to be the town of Sunnydale are not affiliated with Wolfram &amp; Hart, and there are no sorcerors, wizards, demons, cryptoarchaeologists, or occult researchers on their payroll. Or you couldn't prove there were with a world-class law firm and a stack of subpoenas, Gunn said with a toothy grin, and that's all that counts, isn't it? (Did he use to grin like that? Did he look like that when he swung an axe or brought up a crossbow or slung an arm around Wesley's shoulders?)

The foreman, nonetheless, is happy to make way for Wolfram &amp; Hart's Vice President of Occult Research and Intelligence, happy to go over their reports with him, happy to take him out to the pit. They call it that, or they call it the sinkhole. Soulhole, Wesley thinks, Slayerhole. Still a Hellmouth, even closed. He can feel the demonic energy pulse pain-pleasure through his vertebrae, the fight-or-flight shiver in his skin.

Or that could just be memory. The instruments show no discharge of demonic energy, no extradimensional heat. The dust just smells like dust, sage, maybe faintly of ocean when the wind is right. He expected—he isn't sure what he expected. The tickling smell of the dust on old, undisturbed books. The acrid bite of vampire bones, burnt in sunlit seconds to ash.

He tells the foreman to send the instruments to Fred's lab for recalibration and double-checking, and his voice doesn't waver when he says her name. He's proud of that.

He shakes off the foreman's attention to go walking around the pit. He half-stumbles over some mouse bones, a tiny knot of them, spit out by some owl or hawk. His kick scatters them, sends them back to dust.

It's hard to reconcile this with Sunnydale. Sunnydale's choking on nerves and neckties; sunlight and sewers; sullen-eyed girls who are too pretty and too young and despise him. Sunnydale is Cordelia before they ever knew each other, when he thought she was adult, elegant, dazzling, when she thought he was suave, sophisticated, an escape. The brief velvet heat of her skin beneath his hands before they actually tried to kiss, her hummingbird-heartbeat pulse beneath his fingers—these things don't seem to have anything to do with the woman he knew in LA, with any of the women, the actress or the detective or the hero, the friend whose kindness kept him going when Angel abandoned them, the stranger who never came to see him when he was lying in the hospital with his throat cut. And none of them seem related to the comatose invalid in the hospital, growing paler and thinner by the day.

It began here. He thinks it began here. The first time he held a weapon in his hands, and knew what to do with it. The first time he helped save the world. The first time he lost everything, and broke, and put--something together out of the pieces.

A pause, and _I suppose it was only to be expected,_ his father said, when he called, when he had to call; his hands were sweating and he wasn't sure whether it was the thought of breaking the news or the thought that his father might already know that made him feel sicker. There wasn't even disappointment in his father's voice. _I'll wire you the funds for the ticket home._

_Thank you,_ he said, he said thank you, he remembers he said thank you. He can't remember when he decided not to go home, how he found the courage to do it. No matter how hard he tries, he can't remember what he was thinking at all.

5.

The moon's up by the time she knocks on his door. As always, he wonders if the delay is because of the distance traveled or because she just likes to keep him waiting; as always, he doesn't ask.

She casts a disbelieving look around the motel room; runs her hand along the bedspread, and then flicks the feel of polyester off her fingertips with disgust. "I think I preferred your self-flagellation when it came with whiskey and silk."

"Clearly I should have left myself in your expert hands."

"Next time I'll bring a whip. This time we'll have to make do." She straddles his lap, bites his ear: a tease, an invitation to more.

He can't bring himself to grasp her too tightly. He is gentler with her now than he ever was when she was alive. He knows gentleness is not what she wants from him, but it's all he has to give her.

She shames him. He knows how to love more; he's used to it. He doesn't know what to do with being on the other end.

Her body is one long arabesque, the silk scarf another. She's never taken it off, not once in all these visits. He offers her his hands to tie, unsure whether it's submission or curiosity; she hesitates, above him, then refuses with a headshake, with her hands alone pinning his wrists down. It would be easy enough to break the hold and slip his fingers against her sweating skin, her arched neck; slide them beneath the silk to discover whether he left her a scar or an eternal wound.

He lets her hold him down. Watches her eyes as she rides him, curls his fingers in hers as he comes.

He waits till her breathing slows, stops. He wonders how long the habit of deep breath lasts; how long they gasp during sex, the vampires and ghouls and walking undead. When the only breathing he can hear is his own, he kisses her cheek lightly, awkwardly, and gets up. "I'll be in the shower."

Her voice stops him halfway there. "You won't call again, will you. Lover."

He should turn. Honesty is the one thing they've always offered each other.

"No." The bathroom door is painted a sickly ochre, and the doorknob's dented. He bows his head. "I won't."

He can tell she doesn't want to ask. He guesses she's not any stronger than he is, after all. Secretly, he'd always thought she was.

"Why?"

"It doesn't hurt enough anymore."

He opens the door without turning, and when he finishes showering, he's not surprised to find she's already gone.

6.

Angel is holding a glass bird in his hands, or a wand, or a cup, or a Brancusi curve of flight. There is a reflected flame inside it that looks nothing like golden swirl of Angel's soul _(a glass globe in Cordelia's hands)_, but Wesley knows it is a soul anyway.

Angel drops it and it shatters. Little white splinters around his expensive shoes, caught in the folds of his tailored trousers. _See what you made me do!_ he shouts at Wesley, and Wesley stammers an apology and kneels to pick up the splinters, maybe they can be glued together, but all they do is cut his hands open, tiny cuts, lines like paper cuts, only they cut him to the bone and soon his hands are a mess of blood and everything he tries only makes things worse, he can't put this soul back together, he's just smearing blood blood blood all over the clean white glass.

 

_See what you made me do!_ Angel is shouting behind him. _See what you made me do!_

7.

Too much desert and too much sun and endless patched denim highways. America leaves him parched. It used to seem like limitless possibility, the land of reinvention, the home of second chances. A place where he could shake off his past and remake himself into someone entirely and wonderfully new. _(The thrill of the fear on her face when he broke through the door with an axe, the thrill and the arousal and the certainty that he was going to hit her fuck her cut her kill her. The thrill of the revolver backlash snapping into his wrists, and when he looks up, she's wearing the same expression, the very same.)_ He'd like to believe he could do better a second time around, if he could somehow forget it all, if he could just bury his mistakes and his guilts and his shames and wake up clean. He'd like to believe.

It's been a week. He turns the car south and heads toward home.

**Author's Note:**

> Jintian and Sheila Perez beta-read an earlier version of this; remaining flaws are entirely my own fault.


End file.
